A day after stealing HP away from Salesforce, Microsoft's cloud chief calls it a 'takeout'

Microsoft's cloud chief Scott Guthrie just took the rivalry against Salesforce up a notch by calling Monday's big HP deal a "Salesforce takeout."

According to Geekwire's Dan Richman, Guthrie played up the HP deal as one of the biggest public wins for Microsoft's Dynamics CRM software, as it nabbed away one of Salesforce's largest customers.

"HP is a very large Salesforce shop — or they were until yesterday...It was a Salesforce takeout. HP Inc. is planning a massive migration and a big bet on Dynamics. It’s one of the more public (wins) we’ve had," Guthrie said at the Deutsche Bank technology conference on Tuesday.

Gutrhie's excitement isn't too surprising given the deal locked down a major enterprise customer in HP for six years. Since HP, the PC and printer part of the newly split company, has always had a close relationship with Microsoft for its PC business, it's not hard to imagine this partnership developing into a larger deal in the future too.

But perhaps it has more significance because Microsoft was able to take HP away from Salesforce, the market leader in CRM software, and a direct competitor to Microsoft Dynamics. Not to mention the fact that the Microsoft-Salesforce rivalry seems to be heating up again, after a brief bromance period last year.

Still, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff doesn't sound too concerned about losing HP. In an interview with Bloomberg on Tuesday, Benioff said he doesn't view Microsoft as a "major threat" because Salesforce is still the fastest-growing cloud software company in the CRM space and is winning the vast majority of the deals.

"We’re never going to win them all, but we win most, and that’s the most important thing for Salesforce," Benioff said.

Here's a chart from SunTrust that shows the market share and growth of Salesforce compared to its competitors, including Microsoft and Oracle, in the CRM space: